text based rpg info

Hey! My name is Damon, and I just have a few questions aboit developing a text based rpg for the iPhone also im using a tablet so please excuse my typos!

Alrighty well, i'm technically a concept artist and writer, so to that extent i wanted to design a text based rpg, for the iphone!

first of all, let me just say the reason i choose the iphone is so that it will have wide viewability to the public. For some reason i figure its more likely to be played on the iphone

well the first game i want to make, i want it to be very simple just as a test, yet still indepth enough to enjoy. i find something very refreshing about text based games. This game would basically just follow you as a knight traveling from kingdom to kingdom and the things you encounter. There would probably be just two through three choices per encounter, and a choice to view stats.

I already know how to code this stuff in batch using notepad ;b but i dont know how i could transfer that to the iphone, or if there is a certain program i should be using.

Unless there's a Text-Based RPG Maker app out there somewhere (I doubt it), you'll need to learn to program. You can learn it the real way from scratch using Objective-C and all of Apple's frameworks, or you can find some 3rd party programming language and frameworks that that's easier to use. (I can't think of any off the top of my head right now but there's a couple that exist.)

I don't know anything about Ren'Py but the website says it doesn't work on an iPhone, so no matter what it does, it won't work your situation.

The most important thing to keep in mind when making a game is that it's going to feel very hard and take a long time to learn how. But stick with it.

You should start off by learning to program in general. Learn anything. Programming for mobile devices has a lot extra steps which are frustrating so just learning program on your computer first is a good idea.

Z-machine story files are typically straight-up text adventures, but there has been at least one Z-machine RPG that I am aware of.

The Inform compiler is a bit niche, definitely geared for text adventures. It's also been a while since it was updated so I don't know how viable it is now or what the community is like. On the plus side, I recall it had some nifty replay features to let you rewind and replay sequences of your game for testing. And the story files are highly portable so you could develop on Windows or Mac (no iPhone needed), and you could play the story file on just about any platform you can name.

(Also note: Frotz is open-source, though maybe not the iOS port... If you were desperate to make a native game I wonder if you could make a custom Frotz iOS build that just loads your story file and plays it. You'd have to research Frotz's source code license, and possibly contact the current maintainer. I suspect the source code license won't allow it but I thought it was worth mentioning the possibility.)